Flying Lasers Reveal Buried Historical Structures

I wonder how often this will be used as a sort of
"Looting for Dummies"

These findings are fascinating and could well be a treasure trove of ancient history I just worry that if the locations of all the sites that have remained hidden and some of which must be unspoiled are publicly revealed then whatever is there may be more lost than it was to begin with.

Calakmul would be a great site to scan with this technology I was there 2 weeks ago and and its INCREDIBLE it rivals Egypt in grandeur... pic for info:


Regards

This is cool now they'll find even more ancient discoveries. Keep up the good work guys.

reply to post by Mianeye


Thank you, great stuff!

reply to post by Mianeye


I just recently lived in that region of southern France, and its a beautiful place. I can't remember if i visited this village? I will have to go back through my photo's.

reply to post by kix



I whole heartedly agree with you. South/central America is where it's at! There must be so much yet to be discovered in those forests. I think archaeology has only scratched the surface of what lies in the Americas.

i will bet that this application of Laser based topography data will only be a first level alert for further and better investigation such as ground penetrating radar or side scan radar.


if i read other scientific articles correct, there is gravity reading instrument which indicates a denser material or denser structure covered by earth.... thus tipping off the prospector that there is something buried that needs further investigation...
the hidden 'thing' may be a vein of gold bearing quartz or just some WWIi wreckage...

nothing---including remote-viewing is an absolute, sure fire guarantee of finding something of value to someone

I'm going to that valley in Ireland just next week
I'm sure this'll bring all sorts of false info (I'm a "young Earth" believer) but this is a great find, I'm excited to see what they'll uncover. Thanks!
S&F

Originally posted by Wide-Eyes
reply to post by kix

 

I whole heartedly agree with you. South/central America is where it's at! There must be so much yet to be discovered in those forests. I think archaeology has only scratched the surface of what lies in the Americas.

Well according to this report, it is already happening.

Archaeologists explore Peruvian ruins with semi-autonomous drones
By Gene J. Koprowski
Published August 13, 2012
FoxNews.com

Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) aren’t just being used by the CIA to track terrorists in Yemen . Archeologists from Vanderbilt University are now using the sophisticated flying drones to map archaeological sites in the Andes Mountains of Peru from the skies.

The aerial scientific maps they are making with digital video footage of complex, ancient ruins are coming together, quickly, and promising to lead to more discoveries about ancient cultures in the coming years, scientists tell FoxNews.com in an exclusive interview.

“With the UAV, we can fly over the site and capture the required imagery in about 10 minutes,” Steve Wernke, an archeologist at Vanderbilt, who just completed photography of a site in Mawchu Llacta, a colonial town from the 1570s in the Andes, tells FoxNews.com. “Mapping a site of this scale would require about three entire field seasons and additional time during the academic year using traditional methods (that is, via laser.)”

Historically, these researchers walked the grounds of a suspected site of ruins, and used prisms, similar to laser pointers, to mark their spots indicating where they built structures, or storehouses, or where roads were located. Then they would draw a map and connect the points, and in the process identify separate houses, or other buildings, at a site.

Backpack with Software
Wernke teamed up with an engineer, Julie Adams, at Vanderbilt and a UAV developer, Aurora Flight Services, to build a flying device that can fit into a backpack. The drone contains a software system that can discern an optimal flight pattern and transform the resulting data into three-dimensional maps. “Processing the imagery and extracting an analytically-useful map requires significant additional analytical time, but much of that is automated, and is far less than required with traditional methods,” Adams tells FoxNews.com.

Wernke started developing a research project for a large, planned colonial town in the highland Andes of Peru—the site of Mawchu Llacta, located in the modern District of Tuti in the Department of Arequipa.

This archeological site, part of a colonization in the 1570s, houses approximately 400 standing buildings over a large area of at least 25 hectares, or 500 x 500 meters. Frustrated at the slow pace of mapping the site with conventional tools, the scientists developed alternative ideas for mapping the site. Googling on the Internet, Dr. Wernke found Dr. Adams’ website, read about her expertise in robotics, and contacted her.

“From an archaeological point of view, using UAVs to map sites and other medium scale landscape features, e.g., canals, field systems, road networks, could bring major advantages in data capture efficiency and resolution,” said Wernke, in an e-mail interview from Peru this morning. “From an engineering/robotics perspective, developing a system that integrates a UAV with autonomous capabilities for both flight and high resolution image capture capabilities represents a significant research frontier. As UAVs become more prevalent, they appear to be an increasingly cost effective means of archaeological mapping.”

Archaeology, the researchers say, is a fundamentally a spatial discipline. Without an understanding of the context from which artifacts were left behind, scientists say very little about them other than perhaps something about their “style” and approximate date of manufacture.

“To say anything about past societies—past social dynamics—we need to be able to place the material traces of past peoples in their fullest context possible,” Wernke says. “Mapping is therefore at the core of archaeological research, whether we are talking about the distribution of rock chippage -- lithic debitage -- on a cave floor, the distribution of ash and domestic refuse in a house, the distribution of bodies in a mortuary complex, or the distribution of settlements in a regional landscape.”

The work completed this week is just the first phase of the Andes project for Wernke.

There is more noted in the link above you can review.

Ciao

Shane

My brain read the title as " Buried Historical Structures Reveal Flying Lasers "

Thought. Cool.